Blog
This home automator used DMX (the popular theater lighting protocol) to automate all of the lights in his home. [via]
Why automate your lights?
Well, to be honest, most of my house is automated, so it seemed the obvious thing to do.
There are lots of benefits in automating parts of your house, lighting in particular just makes life easier, lights coming on when you walk into a room is better than switching them on yourself! ….and because they turn themselves on, they turn themselves off too, so you can’t forget!
Home lighting automation with DMX - [Link]
200W Lamp Flasher kit is used to flash lamps, bulbs and halogen lamp to give your product that attracting look.
- Input supply – 6 ~ 12 VDC
- Output – upto 200 W lamp / bulb load
- Optically isolated Mains supply
- Onboard preset to adjust the frequency (speed) of flashing (1 Hz to 5 Hz)
- Power Battery Terminal (PBT) for easy input 230 VAC mains and load connection
- Terminal pins for connecting DC power supply
- Four mounting holes of 3.2 mm each
- PCB dimensions 36 mm x 68 mm
200W Lamp Flasher - [Link]
Ian at DIY Life made a nice tutorial video on RGB color mixing with LEDs on the PIC platform. His circuit throws in a handful of extras, like mic input. While perhaps simpler to do on the Arduino with a BlinkM, this project looks like a good PIC starter. His whiteboard circuit diagram drawing lapse is pretty neat, too.
PIC USB color changing light - [Link]
Greg’s “cameleon lamp”, he writes -
Concept: To design a light that mimics a color if shown to it. Design: lamp driver. LEDs are very efficient as they only emit one frequency of light, and because of this the light produced could be perceived as flat and lifeless. Instead i used tungsten bulbs because unlike LEDs they aren’t flat and lifeless. Because the Arduino cannot provide enough current to power a tungsten bulb without damaging the Arduino chip, I had to use transistors to turn a separate power source on to power the bulbs. This also meant that the lamp wouldn’t draw too much current from the laptop. To do this i connected the pwm pins to base of the transistors, and grounded the transistors to the Arduino’s ground in series with diodes to prevent current flowing back through the tungsten bulbs from the Arduino. Because i used the pwm pins i could dim the bulbs the same way one can dim LEDs in the Arduino code.colour sensor. Because I wanted the lamp to detect colors and mimic them, I prototyped a simple color sensor. [via]
The cameleon lamp - [Link]
Maker Jimmie Rodgers posted this flashlight variation of the Joule Thief to the MAKE Flickr pool. Take a look. [via]
Joule Thief flashlight - [Link]
This device can be used as a lamp dimmer or a flame flicker simulator, and may be switched on and off with the switch on a lamp. The flicker dynamics may be customized for candle, kerosene (or oil) lamp or campfire. Replacing the controls with fixed resistors yields a version inexpensive enough to build an array of them for independently flickering electric candles.
Lamp flame flicker simulator - [Link]
This discussion covers 3 different Xenon flashing circuits from disposable cameras. From them, you will learn circuit tricks that have NEVER been shown in any theory book.
You are going to like this project. It costs less than $3.00, contains six BUILDING BLOCKS, re-cycles a disposable flash camera and you are going to learn a lot about electronics. Everyone has seen a disposable flash camera. Every supermarket, photographic store and corner shop has them near the check-out counter. For less than $20 you get a pre-loaded camera with a flash! It’s absolutely amazing technology, but what a waste of resources! After 12-27 flashes, you throw away the camera and a perfectly good flash unit.
Xenon Lamp Flasher - [Link]
Build this 20 watt Fluoro Inverter, it drives two 20-watt tubes or a 40-watt tube! It’s a circuit you can put together from junk box components or build from a kit. It’s very simple to build and requires no printed circuit board. The transformer is hand-wound on a ferrite rod (from an old transistor radio) and the winding wire can be salvaged from an old transformer.
12V Fluorescent Light Inverter - [Link]
